Saturday, February 28, 2009

Louis Auchincloss: The Swaim Tape

Today's email brought a link to the "Wired for Books" website, which posts interviews by the radio broadcaster Don Swaim of a host of late twentieth-century writers, including Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Calvin Trillin (the subject of six interviews). All are available as downloadable MP3 files. I mention the collection on a Legal History Blog because it includes an interview of Louis Auchincloss, the literary chronicler of Manhattan's professional elite. The interview is of course no substitute for the novels and short stories, but it is a very interesting encounter with a participant observer of the patrician members of the "City Bar" of New York.